Friday, 23 September 2016

The scientific world is developing a knack for reading texts without opening them. Researchers in Israel and the US have conducted the first 'virtual unwrapping' of a heavily damaged scroll, the En-Gedi scroll, to read its contents without destroying what's left.

The team used a high-resolution volumetric scan to create a 3D model of the scroll, looked for bright pixels in the model (a sign of where the ink would be) and virtually flattened the scroll to make text segments readable.